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12/16/2003: "Dot and Dash"

So why Telegram? Nobody asked, but I'll answer anyway. Admittedly it's not as interesting as the story behind LYP. I'd had a few free diaries and journals which were generally called My Parnassus, and I lost interest in every one of the succession in short order. Last summer, I learned about a project called 100 Words, where you write an entry every day exactly one hundred words in length. This seemed like the right amount of work, over a limited time period, with just the right amount of challenge in it. I completed the assignment in July and, having got the habit, looked for a free site to continue the discipline and chose Journalspace. Not too great but free and easy. As I was registering, they asked me to name my journal; I drew a blank and then my eyes rested on a Barbara Tuchman book. Telegram in the title. Telegrams are short, as I expected my entries to be. Telegrams are acclaimed as an early use of binaries in communication, and underneath it all this stuff is nothing but dots and dashes. My Journalspace goodies ran out after three months, and so did I, to my own domain. I found out in July that writing a little every day wasn't that hard (not as hard as reading, but that's not my job), so I've been doing it ever since.